Tuesday 12 October 2010 02.29 EDT
First published on Tuesday 12 October 2010 02.29 EDT

It was the decision that threatened to define his time in charge of BBC Radio 4. Now the station's former controller Mark Damazer has revealed his controversial decision to axe the early morning UK Theme was in part down to a human error – he thought it had an audience of hundreds when in fact it was hundreds of thousands.

Damazer, who stood down last month after six years in charge of Radio 4 to become head of St Peter's College, Oxford, has always defended his decision to axe the Fritz Spiegl medley in 2006 in favour of an early-morning news summary.

The UK Theme had heralded the start of Radio 4's daily broadcast for more than 30 years. Its removal prompted hundreds of complaints from the notoriously sensitive Radio 4 audience and even led to questions being asked in the House of Commons.

At his leaving do last month, as recounted in the new issue of Radio Times, Damazer said he had seen audience figures showing that only a few hundred people tuned in to Radio 4 at 5.30am.

It was later discovered that Damazer had misread the figures, and the actual audience for the slot was many times bigger.

The 5.30am slot had an average weekly reach of 800,000 listeners in the first quarter of 2006, when the UK Theme last aired.

The audience for the timeslot had grown steadily since then and stood at 900,000 in the equivalent period – the first three months – of 2010.

Damazer has said he had no regrets about removing the UK Theme but admitted to underestimating listener sensivities. "I don't regret it but I think I underestimated the fact that I was causing some people considerable pain," he said in May.